SC committee moves to restrict CRANK, delay decisions on other books
The committee featured a number of apparent changes to procedure
The South Carolina Instructional Materials Review Committee held its second meeting today after being established this year in response to the passage of State Board Regulation 43-170, which expands the State Board of Education’s power over instructional materials decisions and attempts to define content which is unsuitable for all students. The committee ultimately voted unanimously to restrict one book, retain another, and postpone decision on the rest.
A meeting mired in technical glitches
Chair Christian Hanley (a former school board candidate, representing Berkeley and Charleston), as he did during the first committee meeting, began by addressing technical issues that would go on to plague the whole meeting, which was held through the online platform WebEx.
“We’re having trouble getting the electrons talking to each other,” Hanley joked, as he had during the pervious meeting.
At one point, Hanley acknowledged they set up the WebEx meeting incorrectly and that some individuals who had signed up to speak hadn’t been able to access it.
Throughout the meeting, Department of Education General Counsel John Tyler paused the proceedings multiple times to deal with “technical issues.” During one of these pauses, after the discussion of the challenge against the state-adopted textbook, the group including Hanley and committee member Rita Allison had to be reminded to turn off their mic. (Hanley could apparently be heard to say, “This is painful,” before the mic was turned off.)
Several long stretches of silence were punctuated only by computer beeps and repeated “This meeting is being recorded” audio messages.
The last committee meeting also had some technical issues, though less severe, with some individuals who signed up not able to access the meeting. Hanley said this time IT would mute microphones and cameras of participants until was their turn to speak.
At times audio was not available from some speakers, and there were multiple delays that stretched the meeting out to almost two hours despite the short list of four books being considered, and the shared three-minute time limit for any group of speakers for or against each book.
Changes in procedure
The last committee meeting was led by Hanley, with recommendations for each book delivered by staff attorney Robert Cathcart taking up a large portion of the proceedings. This time, Tyler started the meeting by reviewing the regulation. He pointed out a number of options the Board had other than fully removing texts from all schools (including age-restricting them). These options were never formerly presented to board members during the previous committee meeting.
Tyler also reminded the committee that the regulation defines “descriptions or visual depictions of sexual conduct” as inappropriate for all ages.
It felt like the committee may have been responding to some pushback after the last meeting, both from the public and the Full Board, on the procedures it was choosing to follow in considering and making recommendations on the books. In that first meeting, the focus of committee members was exclusively on “sexual content,” and recommendations from the Department were merely to either retain or to remove the books from every school. As a result, seven books were ultimately completely removed, while books that the committee acknowledged did have content that almost “crossed the line” of including “sexual content” (such as 1984), were completely retained without age restriction.
Hanley added, “A fifth option could be, if you don’t feel you had enough information in the complaint form filed, you could also do nothing” and the complainant would have to resubmit. Ultimately, this was the main approach of the committee in dealing with the newly-challenged works.
Considering the challenge to a state-adopted textbook
The Fort Mill parent who brought the three new challenges— to a state-adopted eighth grade literature textbook and the novels The House on Mango Street and Bronx Masquerade— testified three times during the meeting.
In her first set of remarks, she gave essentially the same speech she gave the Fort Mill School board in September, which was also very similar to the language of her formal complaint about HHM Into Literature Grade Eight. She confirmed the Fort Mill district had sent her formal complaints to the State Board, instead of addressing them directly.
Cathcart returned and explained that, “Fort Mill did not feel comfortable taking up this challenge” in reference to the textbook, apparently because of its status as a state-adopted text. Cathcart also claimed there was a “higher standard for textbooks because they have already been pre-vetted by the Board” (during the statewide review process).
He pointed out that complainant had not included “specific allegations that is matched with specific evidence.” This would become a common refrain throughout the meeting.
“Books are mirrors where readers can see themselves and windows where they can safely see into the lives of others… These are just authentic stories of young people coming of age, which our students experience every day.”
-Testimony of Taylor Simon during the meeting.
For the first of at least three times, Cathcart also reminded the committee that, “Viewpoint discrimination is not allowed” in considering complaints, a pointed reminder that might have been in response to multiple allegations during the last Full Board meeting that viewpoint discrimination was occurring. (Full disclosure, I am one of several speakers who have suggested that the committee is applying different standards to books based on its preexisting biases.)
Chair Hanley agreed that the complaint about the textbook did not seem to outline material that violated the regulation, but in doing so he brought up several issues that are not specifically addressed by the regulation: “I personally didn’t see anything that was glorifying drug use… or sexual assault, or any other violent activities.”
Cathcart said he hadn’t read the material, himself, and that it was incumbent on complainants to give specific information for the committee to consider. (In the previous meeting, Cathcart explicitly established that committee members, themselves, were not required to read the books, but merely to confirm that the “violative language” was present.) He suggested the complainant could still provide that information, opening up the possibility that the committee could give the parent more time to find specific examples (which they would ultimately vote to do for the two newly-challenged novels).
Committee member Joyce Crimminger (a former English teacher, representing Chester, Fairfield, and Lancaster) remarked briefly on the textbook, saying, “Even at the school level, the teachers have the ability to go through the materials and see what is there.” She said she had no objection to the materials included in the textbook that she had taught in the past, though it wasn’t clear how or if this remark related to the novels, which evidently were included, at least in part, in the textbook.
Hanley again reviewed the choices, which he said included, “We could remove it completely from all South Carolina schools,” “doing nothing,” allowing the complainant to amend the complaint to add more evidence, or deciding not to restrict a material at all.
Crimminger moved to retain the textbook. Committee member Tammy Shore seconded the motion. The committee unanimously voted to retain.
The challenge to Bronx Masquerade
The complainant returned to say Nikki Grimes’ verse novel Bronx Masquerade encouraged “guns, drugs, and alcohol”.
This time, she did provide some specific examples from the book, although none seemed to meet the criteria laid out the by the committee of containing “sexual content”. She did, notably, include multiple examples of the text addressing race, and at one point alleged, “My son and his classmates were very uncomfortable listening to an audio book of this book for weeks”. (For me, at least, this brought to mind the Lexington-Richland 5 students who complained about being assigned Between the World and Me, by TeNehisi Coates, in their AP Language course. Those students claimed reading and discussing the book somehow made them feel “uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian”.)
At this point, Hanley seemed to forget that members of the public had signed up to give testimony in favor of retaining Bronx Masquerade, and attempted to move on to a vote, but was reminded by Cathcart about the individuals waiting to testify.
The first speaker signed up to address Bronx Masquerade yielded her time. The speaker’s audio was not available to all participants, but the board seemed able to hear her.
Tayler Simon, owner of the book store Liberation is Lit, spoke on behalf of Bronx Masquerade, saying “The story includes the voices of Black, white, and Latin(a) students,” and that, “They share about their experiences of relationship violence, which one in 12 teens [experience in South Carolina].”
“Books,” Simon continued, “are mirrors where readers can see themselves and windows where they can safely see into the lives of others… These are just authentic stories of young people coming of age, which our students experience every day.”
She suggested that parents uncomfortable with content should take the opportunity to have conversations with their children about “familial values,” in lieu of challenging them at the state level.
Hanley said, in reference to the complainant’s examples, “I don’t see enough detail there, I would need to see a direct quote from the book to know whether it violates the regulation or not”. This was a significant change from the first meeting, in which committee members never asked to see additional detail, and ruled on three books without ever seeing any direct quotes.
Allison moved to carry over the discussion of Bronx Masquerade, again breaking from the procedures used in the first meeting— where a vote to “delay” CRANK arose only after committee members seemed reluctant to take any action at all, resulting in a long pause with no one saying anything, before Chair Hanley suggested they move to delay. Allison said she wanted to look for “further information,” and under questioning from Hanley clarified that the complainant would have to provide it.
Crimminger seconded the motion to postpone, and the committee unanimously voted to give the complainant yet another chance to submit more information.
The complaint against The House on Mango Street
The committee then moved to The House on Mango Street. The book was evidently given to the gifted/ talented students at the complainant’s child’s school. Most of the complainant’s testimony was a general summary of the book, without direct quotes.
In her own testimony in favor of retaining the novel, a retired English teacher spoke on behalf of “this beautiful and unusual literary work,” which she said she had seen taught since 1985, and frequently uses with English Language Learners. She said the book was “selected for a variety of reasons” including “the rarity of a strong Latina female protagonist,” and pointed out that it won an American Book Award.
She acknowledged that the book “features gritty material, yes, just like life— not graphically described, but implied.”
“Why you would consider banning this or any selected book is baffling,” she said at the end of her remarks. “Trust what your educators chose.”
Notably, both The House on Mango Street and Bronx Masquerade have been included (at least in the past) in formal Department of Education lists of materials. It was not clear why this did not qualify them for the same “higher standard” of consideration as the state-adopted textbook.
Although the committee website does include several pages of quotes from Bronx Masquerade (as well as an apparently broken link to “supplemental materials” for The House on Mango Street, which previously included a recommendation from the Department to retain that book), the committee did not discuss these directly. Hanley suggested that the complaint form require direct quotes from complainants in the future.
Evidently taking Hanley’s lead, committee member Cheryl Collier (Greenville, Pickens) moved to defer decision on The House on Mango Street. Member Tammy Shore seconded, and the committee unanimously voted to defer decision, giving the complainant more time to make her case.
A final committee decision to restrict CRANK
The committee then moved on to the reconsideration of CRANK. Hanley pointed out that the list of out-of-context quotes from the book provided by Department staff had increased to “about five pages this time.”
Jennifer Rainville from the Appleseed Legal Justice Center testified in favor of retaining the book. She alluded to previous “confusion” during committee and board meetings about how the committee was defining “sexual content,” and used the apparent precedent established during the board’s discussion of 1984 to argue CRANK doesn’t violate the regulation’s standard.
During her testimony, Rainville acknowledged, “Yes, there is sexual content in this book. However, when this committee was talking about 1984 it was stated that ‘if the reader had no idea what sex was, after reading the passages they would not be able to deduce it by reading those lines.’ I read this book cover to cover after that meeting and Hopkins never crosses the line established by this committee when discussing 1984.”
She went on to say, “No body parts are graphicly described and no acts are described in graphic detail. Therefore, it does not violate the regulation.”
Rainville, an attorney, ended by saying, “I’m happy to answer any questions for this committee since I read the book cover to cover,” but the committee did not take her up on this offer
Hanley simply responded, “Thank you for staying under the three minutes.”
An apparent inconsistency in applying the standard
Interestingly, Cathcart said CRANK was a “close call,” in terms of containing violative “sexual content,” despite having material very similar to 1984. He also seemed to apply a new standard not discussed with 1984 about the “cognitive or emotional capacity” of students, and said, “Even if this committee doesn’t find it has sexual conduct… the committee can still evaluate the material under that definition.”
Hanley says “this author may have gotten little closer to the line” than 1984 but did not explain how or give examples, and it was never completely clear what the material difference might be between the language in 1984 and the cited language in CRANK (particularly since, aside from public testimony, the committee has never publicly reviewed any of the language in 1984).
Rainville later told me that she focused on the apparent standard used for 1984 because in the regulation, itself, the “standard is so vague as it is written that it can be interpreted a lot of different ways.” While she acknowledged that “CRANK might have some other issues,” such as drug use, “that parents might be concerned with,” she also felt the context was important: “With CRANK, specifically, that book very clearly describes the exhausting chaos that being addicted to drugs is.”
Cathcart said the State Department recommended that a parent consent be required in order for students to access CRANK, which in practice means many school districts will likely choose not to purchase the book or make it available at all. (Again, this option was not presented for other books, such as 1984, which the committee acknowledge came “close to the line”.) Hanley said he wanted the five page report on CRANK included so that parents had the option of “informed consent” in their decision to allow their students to read the book.
Crimminger moved to restrict CRANK to students whose parents opted in using this as-yet-undefined “informed consent” process. Allison seconded, and the motion to restrict CRANK passed unanimously.
The committee’s recommendations were added to the consent agenda; the full State Board of Education meeting will discuss them at its next meeting.
Contact information for the committee members can be found here.